(Photograph of friends taken in June on Mount Tabor, site of the Transfiguration)

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

-Leonard Cohen

This morning a beautiful man shared this simple expression with a small group of friends that sat huddled together enjoying a cup of coffee as the sun came up. He was quoting his friend Roy, whom he’d met in California more than 50 years prior. Roy was in recovery and undoubtedly had many stories, many life experiences from which to draw. But he preferred simply to say this: “My name is Roy, and I’m an alcoholic.” After a brief pause he would add: “O, the wonder of it all.”

It seems Roy preferred to remain plugged into the Great Reality that is the Grace of God breaking into our world and into our lives in a way that is very real. Miracles happen every day if we will but pause and look around us, if we will pause and see each other.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, is coming into the world. That light is love, and it gives itself to the whole world. The promise that is Jesus is the promise of lives transformed again and again. Miracles can and do happen at times instantaneously. But more often they occur very slowly over time, becoming clear to us only as we look back. The light always shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. When this is not immediately apparent, we must lift one another up, and we must reach out to the suffering, to the forgotten, to the unlovable.

Roy understood, I think, that his powerlessness and his shortcomings provided a way for the One who created us all to enter in.